More like ‘Pokémon Go to the Movies,’ amirite? Guys …?
Pokemon: Detective Pikachu, directed by Rob Letterman. Written by Dan Hernandez et al. Starring Ryan Reynolds, Justice Smith, and Kathryn Newton. Legendary Entertainment, The Pokemon Company, and Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2019. 1 hour and 44 minutes. Rated PG.
If I may say so, I think I’m in a good position to review this particular movie: I happen to be something of a weeb, but I also happen to be largely unfamiliar with the Pokémon franchise simply because (with notable exceptions) I gravitate away from the the never-ending mega-cash cows in favor of smaller, more self-contained, more indie stuff. I have nothing against Pokémon; I just don’t know it. So today I intend to address the question, “How accessible is Detective Pikachu to the outsider?”
The answer is, surprisingly … pretty darn accessible.
Oh, sure, there are some concepts that could have been better fleshed out. The notion of “Pokémon evolution” is mentioned and even becomes central to the plot without adequate explanation. (Knowing that this is based on a franchise of video games, I could infer that evolving means “leveling up,” but other viewers might be lost.) The film also acts as if I’m supposed to know who the hell Mewtwo is. But aside from that—and these are ultimately minor—I could pretty much understand what was going on.
Detective Pikachu was originally a video game, and it is an unusual, quirky, stand-out title in the Pokémon canon, featuring as it does a mystery-themed story and a Pikachu who can talk. That makes it a decidedly odd choice for the first-ever big-budget Hollywood Pokémon movie. It would make more sense to start this movie franchise by introducing us to Ash, or a character like him—a bright-eyed young boy who wants to capture and train Pocket Monsters, and who does battle with Team Rocket or similar villains. We might expect the first-ever live-action Pokémon film to be a sports story, or maybe a Pokémon version of How to Train Your Dragon. Instead, Detective Pikachu drops us into the middle of the Pokémon universe and introduces us to a protagonist who’s jaded with Pokémon training and an antagonist who questions its very morality. That’s a bold move for a franchise’s first entry into a new medium.
It mostly works—except when it doesn’t. The film opens with one brief scene in which our hero, Tim Goodman (played gamely if unevenly by an anemic-looking Justice Smith), and a childhood friend we never see again make an ill-fated attempt at capturing a Pokémon with a Pokéball. A little later, an infodump delivered as a snippet from a television documentary introduces us to the concept of Pokémon battles—and that’s all we get as far as world-building goes. After that, the movie lets you sink or swim on your own.
If you’re comfortable with genre movies, you’ll probably swim, as many of the blanks are easy to fill in for someone familiar with fantasy or science fiction generally. It’s clear from the film’s mixed reviews, however, that a lot of critics are sinking: The movie has barely managed to eke out a “fresh” rating on the Tomatometer, and when we look over the comments from the negative reviews, we get the impression that the critics who hate it do so simply because they don’t “get” it. The movie has a straightforward story line, but they’re calling it incomprehensible.
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